The Fourth 'Book of Schemes'. Album #1, the Second Folder 1978

Valerii Lamakh made this artwork, ‘The Fourth "Book of Schemes"’, with ink on paper. Lamakh reduces forms to horizontal and vertical lines; marks that seem almost like a primal language. I imagine him repeating the different marks over and over again, each a slight variation on the last, searching for a way to communicate an idea. Maybe he’s thinking about systems, codes, or some kind of symbolic architecture. The nine squares feel like a painterly take on Sol LeWitt’s modular structures, but with a much more handmade, intuitive approach. I wonder if Lamakh was looking at the Russian Constructivists and their attempts to develop a universal visual language. These simple shapes and the way that they combine feel grounded in the body, like they were created through the directness of hand and eye, and the repetition of his mark. Ultimately, artists are always in dialogue, remixing and responding to what came before, and I see this piece as a fascinating contribution to that ongoing conversation.